Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays
    Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays
    Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays
    Ebook123 pages1 hour

    Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays

    By G.K Chesterton

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    This early work by G. K. Chesterton was originally published in 1917. Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in London in 1874. He studied at the Slade School of Art, and upon graduating began to work as a freelance journalist. Over the course of his life, his literary output was incredibly diverse and highly prolific, ranging from philosophy and ontology to art criticism and detective fiction. However, he is probably best-remembered for his Christian apologetics, most notably in Orthodoxy (1908) and The Everlasting Man (1925). We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateMar 31, 2016
    ISBN9781473369757
    Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays
    Author

    G.K Chesterton

    G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was a prolific English journalist and author best known for his mystery series featuring the priest-detective Father Brown and for the metaphysical thriller The Man Who Was Thursday. Baptized into the Church of England, Chesterton underwent a crisis of faith as a young man and became fascinated with the occult. He eventually converted to Roman Catholicism and published some of Christianity’s most influential apologetics, including Heretics and Orthodoxy. 

    Read more from G.K Chesterton

    Related to Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays

    Related ebooks

    Anthropology For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Tripping the Late Capitalist Sublime

      Jan 28, 2022

      If our religion is capitalism, then our theology is consumerism and our God is the Invisible Hand. Our prayers are "Have it Your Way," "Think Different," and "Just Do It;" our avatars are Ronald McDonald, Mr. Peanut, and the Kool-Aid Man The post Tri

      18 min read

    • Article

      The M25 is our Maginot Line

      Sep 30, 2021

      If all opinions that I disagree with were made illegal, fascism would be over. Under the current tyranny of "free speech”, bigots feel emboldened to harass me online with their calls for "debate” and "discussion”. Luckily, the police have been monito

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Case Against Junipero Serra

      Oct 2, 2018

      The Case Against Junipero Serra
      6 min read

    • Article

      Post-colonial Bad Jokes

      Mar 25, 2021

      Post-colonial Bad Jokes
      5 min read

    • Article

      Jonah Goldberg: Pandemic Is A Blown Opportunity For Conservative Nationalists

      May 20, 2020

      Future historians of the American right are going to have a devil of a time figuring out what the hell happened as the second decade of the 21st century came to a close. But every day I become more convinced about at least one of their conclusions: T

      3 min read

    • Article

      Some Wars Are Just

      Nov 24, 2022

      Some Wars Are Just
      6 min read

    • Article

      Chesterton revisited DAN HITCHENS

      Aug 25, 2021

      Harbour Books £20 Invited to give a reading at the Catholic Poetry Society, G K Chesterton sat in miserable silence, unable to remember a single poem. ‘Will you recite The Donkey?’ someone asked. ‘Don’t know it,’ came the doleful reply. He brightened

      3 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Oct 8, 2020

      Thank you for making my life more joyful month after month. I can’t tell you how important to me the Fortean Times is. Kevin Hope By email Regarding Matt Salusbury’s Forum article on sunken bells [FT396:54-55], there is more to the bells of Aberdyfi

      14 min read

    • Article

      Timelessness Trumps Timely

      Nov 26, 2020

      THE LITERARY CRITIC John Carey in 2000 published Pure Pleasure: A Guide to the 20th Century’s Most Enjoyable Books. In it he warned of those who associate reading with “swank and false refinement” and argued for “pure reading-pleasure”. Crucially, fo

      5 min read

    • Article

      Fallen idols

      Jun 11, 2021

      Fallen idols
      15 min read

    • Article

      “Getting Thrilled, Titillated Or Angry At Celebrities Can Change How We Think”

      Mar 19, 2020

      Ellie Cawthorne: You argue in the book that celebrity is a slippery concept. How do you define it? Greg Jenner: When I began writing, I made the foolish assumption that there would be a clear-cut definition of celebrity. But a year-and-a-half later

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Devil Strides Our Countryside

      Jan 26, 2023

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM Jeremy Harte Reaktion Books 2022 Hb, 296pp, £15.99, ISBN 9781789146509 One of the most beloved of Doctor Who stories has long been 1971’s “The Daemons”. Over the cou

      15 min read

    • Article

      Bird’s Words

      Oct 16, 2023

      It was a bit like the very early days for me when I got off the train at Lime Street in the centre of Liverpool last week. In the old days, in the early 1970s, I would be traipsing around to shops selling posters that I had produced, trying to make a

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Modern Way Of Mourning

      Sep 29, 2022

      I WATCHED THE OLDER GENTLEMAN FUMBLE with his ticket. A thick tie knot just short of his shirt’s top button spoke of a return to formality of dress for someone now long used to the comfortable sartorial consolations of retirement. He had a day Travel

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Landscape Was His Mistress

      Feb 9, 2022

      IN 1802, John Constable wrote seven observations and resolutions about art. In them, among other things, he pledged to follow Nature, to make ‘unaffected’ pictures, and to avoid ‘common place people’. He also declared that ‘there is no easy way of be

      5 min read

    • Article

      Make A Spectacle Of Oneself

      Oct 27, 2022

      AWARE THAT QUEEN Elizabeth I said to Robert Cecil, a much greater man than I, “Little man, little man: must is not a word to be used to princes,” I am hesitant to address my new Sovereign Lord with the word “must”. But the Coronation must not be a se

      3 min read

    • Article

      Thinking On Inking

      Nov 25, 2021

      IN THE EARLY 1960S, on Sundays at Speakers’ Corner, there was a man who would take off his shirt and reveal that every inch of his torso was covered in tattoos. He said not a word but had a knowing smile or smirk upon his face; the assembled audience

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Greatest Cancellation

      Nov 25, 2021

      For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings; How some have been deposed; some slain in war, Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed; Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d And some were cance

      3 min read

    • Article

      Crowning Glory

      May 21, 2023

      Crowning Glory
      2 min read

    • Article

      Crowning Glory

      May 21, 2023

      Crowning Glory
      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays - G.K Chesterton

      1.png

      Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays

      By

      G. K. Chesterton

      Copyright © 2016 Read Books Ltd.

      This book is copyright and may not be

      reproduced or copied in any way without

      the express permission of the publisher in writing

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      Contents

      G. K. Chesterton

      A SONG OF SWORDS

      UTOPIA OF USURERS

      THE ESCAPE

      THE NEW RAID

      THE NEW NAME

      A WORKMAN’S HISTORY OF ENGLAND

      THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE IRISH

      LIBERALISM: A SAMPLE

      THE FATIGUE OF FLEET STREET

      THE AMNESTY FOR AGGRESSION

      REVIVE THE COURT JESTER

      THE ART OF MISSING THE POINT

      THE SERVILE STATE AGAIN

      THE EMPIRE OF THE IGNORANT

      THE SYMBOLISM OF KRUPP

      THE TOWER OF BEBEL

      A REAL DANGER

      THE DREGS OF PURITANISM

      THE TYRANNY OF BAD JOURNALISM

      THE POETRY OF THE REVOLUTION

      G. K. Chesterton

      Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in London in 1874. He studied at the Slade School of Art, and upon graduating began to work as a freelance journalist. By 1905, he had a regular and popular column with the Illustrated London News, and began to write on an array of topics. Over the course of his life, his literary output was incredibly diverse and highly prolific, ranging from philosophy and ontology to art criticism and detective fiction. However, he is probably best-remembered for his Christian apologetics, most notably in Orthodoxy (1908) and The Everlasting Man (1925). George Bernard Shaw dubbed Chesterton a man of colossal genius, and of his fiction Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges said Chesterton knew how to make the most of a detective story. Chesterton died in 1936, aged 62.

      A SONG OF SWORDS

      "A drove of cattle came into a village called Swords;

      and was stopped by the rioters."—Daily Paper.

      In the place called Swords on the Irish road

      It is told for a new renown

      How we held the horns of the cattle, and how

      We will hold the horns of the devils now

      Ere the lord of hell with the horn on his brow

      Is crowned in Dublin town.

      Light in the East and light in the West,

      And light on the cruel lords,

      On the souls that suddenly all men knew,

      And the green flag flew and the red flag flew,

      And many a wheel of the world stopped, too,

      When the cattle were stopped at Swords.

      Be they sinners or less than saints

      That smite in the street for rage,

      We know where the shame shines bright; we know

      You that they smite at, you their foe,

      Lords of the lawless wage and low,

      This is your lawful wage.

      You pinched a child to a torture price

      That you dared not name in words;

      So black a jest was the silver bit

      That your own speech shook for the shame of it,

      And the coward was plain as a cow they hit

      When the cattle have strayed at Swords.

      The wheel of the torrent of wives went round

      To break men’s brotherhood;

      You gave the good Irish blood to grease

      The clubs of your country’s enemies;

      you saw the brave man beat to the knees:

      And you saw that it was good.

      The rope of the rich is long and long—

      The longest of hangmen’s cords;

      But the kings and crowds are holding their breath,

      In a giant shadow o’er all beneath

      Where God stands holding the scales of Death

      Between the cattle and Swords.

      Haply the lords that hire and lend

      The lowest of all men’s lords,

      Who sell their kind like kine at a fair,

      Will find no head of their cattle there;

      But faces of men where cattle were:

      Faces of men—and Swords.

      UTOPIA OF USURERS

      I. Art and Advertisement

      I propose, subject to the patience of the reader, to devote two or three articles to prophecy. Like all healthy-minded prophets, sacred and profane, I can only prophesy when I am in a rage and think things look ugly for everybody. And like all healthy-minded prophets, I prophesy in the hope that my prophecy may not come true. For the prediction made by the true soothsayer is like the warning given by a good doctor. And the doctor has really triumphed when the patient he condemned to death has revived to life. The threat is justified at the very moment when it is falsified. Now I have said again and again (and I shall continue to say again and again on all the most inappropriate occasions) that we must hit Capitalism, and hit it hard, for the plain and definite reason that it is growing stronger. Most of the excuses which serve the capitalists as masks are, of course, the excuses of hypocrites. They lie when they claim philanthropy; they no more feel any particular love of men than Albu felt an affection for Chinamen. They lie when they say they have reached their position through their own organising ability. They generally have to pay men to organise the mine, exactly as they pay men to go down it. They often lie about the present wealth, as they generally lie about their past poverty. But when they say that they are going in for a constructive social policy, they do not lie. They really are going in for a constructive social policy. And we must go in for an equally destructive social policy; and destroy, while it is still half-constructed, the accursed thing which they construct.

      The Example of the Arts

      Now I propose to take, one after another, certain aspects and departments of modern life, and describe what I think they will be like in this paradise of plutocrats, this Utopia of gold and brass in which the great story of England seems so likely to end. I propose to say what I think our new masters, the mere millionaires, will do with certain human interests and institutions, such as art, science, jurisprudence, or religion—unless we strike soon enough to prevent them. And for the sake of argument I will take in this article the example of the arts.

      Most people have seen a picture called Bubbles, which is used for the advertisement of a celebrated soap, a small cake of which is introduced into the pictorial design. And anybody with an instinct for design (the caricaturist of the Daily Herald, for instance), will guess that it was not originally a part of the design. He will see that the cake of soap destroys the picture as a picture; as much as if the cake of soap had been used to Scrub off the paint. Small as it is, it breaks and confuses the whole balance of objects in the composition. I offer no judgment here upon Millais’s action in the matter; in fact, I do not know what it was. The important point for me at the moment is that the picture was not painted for the soap, but the soap added to the picture. And the spirit of the corrupting change which has separated us from that Victorian epoch can be best seen in this: that the Victorian atmosphere, with all its faults, did not permit such a style of patronage to pass as a matter of course. Michael Angelo may have been proud to have helped an emperor or a pope; though, indeed, I think he was prouder than they were on his own account. I do not believe Sir John Millais was proud of having helped a soap-boiler. I do not say he thought it wrong; but he was not proud of it. And that marks precisely the change from his time to our own. Our merchants have really adopted the style of merchant princes. They have begun openly to dominate the civilisation of the State, as the emperors and popes openly dominated in Italy. In Millais’s time, broadly speaking, art was supposed to mean good art; advertisement was supposed to mean inferior art. The head of a black man, painted to advertise somebody’s blacking, could be a rough symbol, like an inn sign. The black man had only to be black enough. An artist exhibiting the picture of a negro was expected to know that a black man is not so black as he is painted. He was expected to render a thousand tints of grey and brown and violet: for there is no such thing as a black man just as there is no such thing as a white man. A fairly clear line separated advertisement from art.

      The First Effect

      I should say the first effect of the triumph of the capitalist (if we allow him to triumph) will be that that line of demarcation will entirely disappear. There will be no art that might not just as well be advertisement. I do not necessarily mean that there will be no good art; much of it might be, much of it already is, very good art. You may put it, if you please, in the form that there has been a vast improvement in advertisements. Certainly there would be nothing surprising if the head of a negro advertising Somebody’s Blacking now adays were finished with as careful and subtle colours as one of the old and superstitious painters would have wasted on the negro king who brought gifts to Christ. But the improvement of advertisements is the degradation of artists. It is their degradation for this clear and vital reason: that the artist will work, not only to please the rich, but only to increase their riches; which is a considerable step lower. After all, it was as a human being that a pope took pleasure in a cartoon of Raphael

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1